Sunday, March 01, 2009

Spring is round the corner and everybody's gone Sarkozy Krazy. He recently privately told - Thought Experiments exclusive here - a group of academics that the great thing about being president is the money you can make afterwards, not, he added, that he needed it - flashes flashy watch - now that he was married to Carla. A few weeks ago he said he may not stand for a second term, preferring to bronze on a beach with Bruni.

Eastern European leaders hate being called Eastern Europeans. I can see their point - how about post-communist entities?

Brown is still operated by Mandelson who managed to cover up one of the worst ever weeks of economic news by making us angry about Fred's pot. Cabinet life, you may have noticed, has become much more rancorous since Mandy came back. Meanwhile, Brown still thinks he's in charge, though it is not clear of what.

5 comments:

...And the 50k he is leaving there after the "withdrawal"? The “transitional force”

Its amazing how those morning CIA intelligence briefings focus the mind.

As far as I can see this is the same plan Dubya put in place with the Iraqis last year except for the explicit Plan B to stay if the situation gets bad again, as opposed to Bams implicit undertakings.

Personally I like the more honest approach to language.

My guess is Iraq will become Americas new Germany, the Kurds want them to stay for obvious reasons, the Sunnis are now a minority and need american guarantees (forget the hate waffle it typical Arab posturing) and the Shias want protection from from the mad mullahs as they are much more secular.

David,The burd who interviewed Carla's weekend shag seems to have an inflated sense of her place in the grand order of things and should not be confused with Emma Kirkby whose singing has given her a place.

Agree with Finkelstein that avoiding mob rule should by now be our primary concern in Sir Fred's case. Even more importantly, the amount is utterly trivial compared to the hundreds of billions now being further committed to save 'the system'. We can't remotely think systemically until we get a basic mathematical sense of proportion. If Mandelson is the pea-brain cynically making use of that it's still our fault for falling for it.

Warming to my own theme, another basic prerequisite for clarity on the banking crisis is to acknowledge that the Tories had no more clue than Nulab. "We will match Labour's spending plans." I rest my case.

That isn't going to affect the result next time. It's clearly time to "throw the rascals out," as the great HL Mencken sagely advised at any and every election.

But the fact that the Tories didn't have a clue what was about to happen should also be faced up to squarely.

Exactly a month ago Cameron's chum Michael Gove did some kite flying back in Scotland about a more consensus-based approach to the current crisis, having been publicly thrashed on the subject in the previous week's Question Time across the border by Glaswegian Sikh wit Hardeep Singh Kohli - something that doesn't often happen to smart boy Gove.

It's stayed on my mind ever since. As I say the Tories are bound to win. They are in the Winston situation in 1940, muck up the Norway campaign and everyone will blame Chamberlain for your own mistakes and make you leader. But, as with Churchill then, brutal honesty is required to get to grips with the stuff that really matters, whoever's in charge.

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.